Scouting and Scavenging is on a mission ‘to spur and impact change at the community levels through professional and NCAA teams’. In January 2020, after learning that most hospitality brands ask their housekeepers to throw away single-use toiletry items after occupancy, even if unused, Milwaukee Bucks’ Manager of Prospect Information Daniel Marks launched the initiative to call on sports industry professionals, including athletes, coaches, managers, others, who travel for work - often leaving hotel rooms after one night of use. The call to action was simple: When checking out of a hotel room, take the gently used and unused single-use toiletry items home. Once collected, they can be donated locally or shipped to the Scouting & Scavenging HQ in Newark, New Jersey. The initiative quickly grew thanks to social media word of mouth and the creation of the Scouting and Scavenging pledge. In the winter of 2020, committed Scavengers even received a branded toiletry kit to make the process even more simple.
Founder Daniel Marks with Scouting & Scavenging Partners with the City of Newark, NJ
The COVID-19 pandemic hit shortly after Scouting & Scavenging launched, which put a pause on all travel, especially related to the sports industry. However, the pandemic did not put a pause on the need for hygiene supplies, nor did it reduce the amount of single-use items required to avoid disease transmission. While many corporate hospitality companies have made commitments to replace single-use bottles with dispensers, there is some concern that the pandemic may pause those efforts.
“Even if hotels eventually mitigate this waste stream by avoiding single-use items, I’m sure we can find other wasteful items during our travel and collect that instead. Until then, toiletry items will continue to be our focus because it just makes sense.”
Marks is the first to admit that his top priority in saving these toiletry items was to redistribute them to people in need, less focused on the environmental benefits of the initiative. In June 2020, he partnered with the Brick City Peace Collective in Newark, NJ to distribute over 2,100 toiletry kits to residents in Newark’s COVID-19 food relief program. Since the start of the 2020-21 season, the initiative has received over 500 pounds of toiletry items, including over 150 pounds of hair care products, 48 pounds of dental products, and over 175 pounds of soap and body wash (these totals do not reflect teams that have decided to donate their products locally within their own communities, which brings the numbers even higher).
A portion of the salvaged toiletry items sent in from Ambassadors
Recipric recently teamed up with Scouting & Scavenging to highlight the positive environmental benefits. Together, they calculated that the initiative has already diverted nearly 700 plastic bottles from landfill, which may amount to over 500 plastic bottles that were likely to end up in the ocean - nearly 80% of plastic waste does. In many places, a plastic bottle full of lotion or shampoo cannot be recycled, so the housekeepers were educated to dispose of bottles, even if they were 75% full, into the garbage. Once donated and used, the bottles would be empty, allowing for a more simple recycling process - Plastic can take up to 450 years to decompose if it’s sent to the landfill.
While the statistics of the initiative are impressive, the untapped potential of widespread sports industry participation is even more exciting:
The NBA alone has around 500 athletes and about 200 team staff that spend approximately 75 nights spent in a hotel room each year. Assuming that half of the hotels still distribute single-use toiletry items and hoping that only half of the NBA participated in Scouting & Scavenging, there’s still an opportunity to collect approximately 11,500 single-use plastic bottles each year, assumed to equate to nearly 4,500 pounds of unused toiletries.
If the four major league men’s sports got involved, they’d be able to divert around 45,000 plastic bottles from polluting the ocean.
College sports is also a tremendous opportunity - The NCAA Division 1 student athlete network is over 175,000 students, each a person with the opportunity to capture these unused items to divert waste.
Now imagine if the initiative were spread across the major and minor leagues, college sports, and even youth travel teams. The opportunity to minimize waste at nearly no additional cost is tremendous.
The Clemson Men’s Basketball team provides a prime example of the results when a team remains dedicated and committed to Scouting & Scavenging - Alone, over the modified 2020-21 basketball season, they collected over 36 pounds of toiletries, which equates to approximately 100 plastic bottles diverted from landfill.
So far, Marks has recruited scavengers from over 90 teams across the NBA, NCAA, and NBA GLeague to collect items this season. He was even able to collaborate with Clean out for a Cause, to provide branded toiletry bags for collections. Clean Out seeks to maximize the impact of used and excess sports gear, while Scouting and Scavenging seeks to do the same with unused toiletries creating a natural partnership between the two organizations. These toiletry bags have been making their way across the country on the #ScavengingUSA tour.
While the initiative is clear and the statistics speak for themselves, Recipric and Scouting & Scavenging hope to continue to tell the social and environmental sides to this story together, highlighting the tremendous opportunity for the sports industry to take positive action. Recipric’s Founder, Kristen Fulmer, has a call to action for all sports teams to kick off their sustainability journey:
“Scouting and Scavenging is one simple step for sports to begin to lead in climate action. While it would be simple for every sports industry professional to participate in this initiative, it is equally simple for each individual or team to find what drives them to give back to their community and take actions towards that.” Recipric’s Founder, Kristen Fulmer.